Pound to Monroe, 2 Oct 1915, on the prizes offered by Poetry: “I have cabled my vote for Eliot. As you might have known.” Then: “No, if your committee dont make the award to Eliot, God only knows what slough of ignominy they will fall into, reaction, death, silliness!!!!!! · · · Eliot’s poem is the only [added: eligible] thing in the year that has any distinction · · · If you dont give the £40 to Eliot for god’s sake award it to yourself.” Prizes, however, were awarded to Vachel Lindsay, Constance Lindsay Skinner and H. D., with The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock given honourable mention, along with twenty other poems (including work by Padraic Colum, D. H. Lawrence, Amy Lowell, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams). Pound to Monroe, 1 Dec 1915: “As to T. S. E. the Prufrock IS more individual and unusual than the Portrait of a Lady. I chose it of the two as I wanted his first poem to be published to be a poem that would at once differentiate him from everyone else, in the public mind. I am sending on some more of his stuff in a few days, I want to see him and talk it over first · · · The Cat. Anth. is out.” Dispatch of the third submission, however, was long delayed. Pound to Monroe, 21 Apr 1916: “Eliot has been worried with schools etc. (i.e. teaching not schools of verse or porpoises). He is to come in next week to plan a book, and I will then send you a group of his things.”
As well as publication of the individual poems, Pound advised TSE on how to shape the volume. Hugh Kenner: “In 1913 Pound compared the epic to a temple, the Commedia to a cathedral, and collected short poems to picture galleries [New Age 9 Oct 1913] · · · It was Pound who took pains, Eliot recalled 40 years later, over the arrangement of Prufrock and Other Observations”, Kenner 1972 355 (“viva voce, 1964”). Pound to Marianne Moore, 16 Dec 1918: “I am inclined to think you would ‘go’ better in bundles about the size of Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations. For what it is worth, my ten or more years of practice, failure, success, etc. in arranging tables of contents, is à votre service. Or at any rate unless you have a definite scheme for a sequence, I would warn you of the very great importance of the actual order of poems in a booklet.” (For TSE’s non-chronological arrangement of Moore’s poems in her Selected Poems (1935), see Andrew J. Kappel, Journal of Modern Literature Summer 1994.)
On the arrangement of volumes. TSE wrote to Herbert Read, 20 June 1920, about the first sequence within Naked Warriors (1919): “they support each other and produce a cumulative effect, as such still life pieces should do”. To Louis MacNeice, 17 Jan 1934: “I think that a first volume ought, if possible, to be able to start off with one or two longish poems which will arrest the attention of the reader at once, and these, if possible, should be among the poet’s most recent work.” (To MacNeice again, 2 Dec 1943: “it isn’t good for any book, and especially for poetry, to be stored too long.”) To Henry Treece, 21 June 1941: “It is a mistake to make a first book too long: even when everything is good—readers must not be allowed to feel surfeited.”
[Poems I 3–28 · Textual History II 309–36]
Pound to the assistant editor of Poetry, Alice Corbin Henderson, 3 May 1916, of a new publisher, John Marshall: “I believe Marshall in N.Y. is to publish a large prose work of mine, on This Generation · · · Marshall may also do Joyce’s novel [A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man] in America, and I hope a book by Eliot.” Pound to his mother, 25 May: “Marshall · · · is to bring out Joyce’s novel as well as my prose book. I shall send him mss. of Eliot’s poems in a few days.” Pound to Harriet Monroe, 29 May: “Here are five poems by Eliot. I am sending off the mss. of his book to the publisher by the same post so there wont be unlimited time for printing these. (I should think three months.)” Marshall had helped to finance Kreymborg’s magazine Others, but his business was not sound and he disappeared in Canada. On 19 Aug, Pound told Quinn that he had asked Kreymborg to “go steal the mss”, but this appears to refer only to his own book, as when he wrote to Henderson, 26 Aug 1916: “no one seems able to find the mss. (unique mss.) of This Generation, which Marshall promised to publish”. (Reid 273 claims that the same fate befell TSE’s putative volume, “the manuscript of which had also disappeared with John Marshall into the Canadian wilds”, but offers no evidence.)
Pound then sent to his own London publisher, Elkin Mathews, a typescript of TSE’s book. Valerie Eliot in 1971 (WLFacs xii, quoting a letter of 11 Apr 1917):
Since the previous April, when he had helped Eliot to select the poems for his first volume, Pound had been urging a reluctant Elkin Mathews to undertake publication. Finally, because the latter was “fussing about cost of paper, etc., and risk, and wanting part expenses paid”, Pound explained to Quinn … “I told him if he wouldn’t publish … without fuss, someone else would. The Egoist is doing it. That is officially The Egoist. As a matter of fact I have borrowed the cost of the printing bill (very little) and am being the Egoist. But Eliot don’t know it, nor does anyone else save my wife, and Miss Weaver of The Egoist [VE: the two lenders] & it is not for public knowledge.” Quinn offered to stand the charge, but Pound was confident that the book would pay its way.
Pound told his father of the book on 27 Mar 1917: “The Egoist is going to publish Eliot’s poems,” adding on 27 Apr: “Eliot’s poems are in proof.” The Publisher’s Circular announced the appearance on 9 June of “Pinfrock and other Observations”. The Egoist Press account book for the book Prufrock (BL) shows that 36 review copies were sent out the day before publication. At a party at Garsington Manor, Clive Bell distributed copies to the Morrells, Mary Hutchinson, Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield, who read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock aloud. The printer’s bill, paid on July 24, was for £13 4s 6d, of which Pound paid more than £5. He was to distribute more than fifty of the copies, sending twelve to America on 28 June. Joyce took a copy—without paying for it—on 7 October. Other customers included Herbert Read, John Quinn (more than a dozen copies), Richard Garnett and Wyndham Lewis (at least seven). The Poetry Bookshop bought batches regularly, as did Hatchard’s. By 4 January 1918, 112 had been paid for, and a year later this had risen to 188. On 28 Oct 1919 only one copy was sold “at Mr Eliot’s lecture”, but this for an inflated 3s. A single copy, probably signed, was sold for 10s 6d on 28 Sept 1920, and the account was closed on 20 Feb 1922 with the entry “last copy Shakespeare & Co 10s 6d”. In all 357 had been sold. Pound was repaid the balance of his loan, TSE’s total royalty was calculated at £6, and the Egoist was left with “commission on edition 18s 8d”.
[Poems I 3–28 · Textual History II 309–36]
Gallup records that on 12 June 1917 Pound had “proposed to Alfred Knopf that he should bring out an American edition”. Quinn to Knopf, 7 July, forwarding a letter from Pound: “I, of course, should like to have you bring out Elliot’s book of poems, including his late ones.” Knopf to Quinn, 17 July: “With regard to Eliot’s Poems, it is impossible for me to say much until I see them. Let him send me a copy and also anything new that he would want to include in my edition. I might say frankly, however, that I do not want to over-burden my list with free verse” (NYPL, Quinn Papers, box 36). Quinn reported to Knopf on 6 Aug that since seeing him he had read Eliot’s volume: “They are very fine poems indeed. The book in paper covers, published by The Egoist, is, I should say, rather too slender a volume for an American publisher, but it is a corker. The poems are the real things · · · I have read these poems, most of them out loud, and they are great.” Knopf to Quinn, 8 Aug: “What you say about Eliot’s poems makes me exceedingly anxious to see them. I feared that what you say about the slenderness of the volume would be true, but I suppose Eliot will go on writing, and before very long there will be enough to justify independent publication over here.” Quinn sent Knopf a copy of Prufrock and Other Observations on 10 Aug, commenting “I don’t like the title · · · The poems are really splendid things.” Knopf to Quinn, 17 Aug: “I have read Eliot’s little book of poems with immense enjoyment. I do not know whether it is great poetry or not. I do know that it is great fun and I like it. I surely ho
pe that he writes some more of it so that we can make a book of him over here. You see the present volume consists of only 32 pages of poetry, and it would be quite impossible to do anything with such a thing over here, except to give it away as an advertisement. And even that would be difficult.”
Pound’s review of the Egoist volume in Egoist June 1917, Drunken Helots and Mr. Eliot, picked up a jibe by Arthur Waugh from Oct 1916, and included what purports to be a comment by TSE: “‘I have tried to write of a few things that really have moved me’ is so far as I know, the sum of Mr. Eliot’s ‘poetic theory.’”
After publication, the Egoist Mar 1918 ran an advertisement for “PRUFROCK | By T. S. Eliot” (1/- net; postage 1d.), quoting the press response:
Westminster Gazette: “A poet who finds even poetry laughable, who views life with a dry, cool derision and comments on it with the true disengagement of wit. He is not like any other poet, not even the Imagists whom he seems at first sight to follow … He writes in an apparent vers libre which has a decidedly rhythmical effect; his handling of language is pointed and often brilliant.”
New Statesman: “Mr. Eliot may possibly give us the quintessence of twenty-first century poetry. Much of what he writes is unrecognizable as poetry at present, but it is all decidedly amusing … He has a keen eye as well as a sharp pen and draws wittily whatever his capricious glance descends upon.”
Daily News: “A witty and dissatisfying book of verse … which flourishes many images that are quite startling in their originality.”
Southport Guardian: “One of the moderns; an imagist; an impressionist … Inevitably as impressions these poems are very unequal. Some are strangely vivid.”
Literary World: “The subjects of the poems, the imagery, the rhythms, have the wilful outlandishness of the young revolutionary idea … With him it seems to be a case of missing the effort by too much cleverness … the strangeness overbalances the beauty.”
Reviewing Passages from the Letters of John Butler Yeats, Selected by Ezra Pound, TSE quoted a letter that describes how a poet “does not seek to be original, but the truth; and to his dismay and consternation, it may be, he finds the original, thereby to incur hostility and misunderstanding”. TSE called this “a thought which takes very deep roots; it strikes through the tangle of literature direct to the subsoil of the greatest—to Shakespeare and Dante and Aeschylus”, The Letters of J. B. Yeats (1917).
Orwell: “If I were asked for the starting-point of modern literature—and the fact that we still call it ‘modern’ shows that this particular period isn’t finished yet—I should put it at 1917, the year in which T. S. Eliot published · · · Prufrock”, The Rediscovery of Europe in Listener 19 Mar 1942.
[Poems I 3–28 · Textual History II 309–36]
4. TITLE, DEDICATION AND EPIGRAPH TO THE VOLUME
The plain buff wrapper of the book stated only “PRUFROCK | T. S. ELIOT”, the full title appearing on the title page. The single word was from the beginning used both for The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and for Prufrock and Other Observations. An advertisement in the Egoist May 1917 read: “Prufrock | THE EGOIST, LTD., is publishing in May a small book of Poems | Prufrock and other Observations”. In the same month in the Little Review, Pound reported publication of TSE’s poems “under the title Mr. Prufrock and Observations”. TSE himself continued to use word Prufrock alone to mean the volume for the rest of his life, as in the Contents pages of 1925, 1936 and 1963. For the name itself, see note on the poem’s title. This first book consisted of twelve poems, of which four had a person’s name in the title, and three had a name in the first line; plus Portrait of a Lady. Of the twelve new poems in Poems (1920), four were again to have a person’s name in the title, and four were to have a name in the first line; plus Gerontion (Portrait of a Little Old Man).
When Conversation Galante, La Figlia Che Piange, Mr. Apollinax and Morning at the Window were published in Poetry Sept 1916, Harriet Monroe gave them the general title Observations (for both the remarkings and the remarks). TSE wrote to her on 7 Sept 1916: “The title you have given will do excellently.” Although “and Other Poems” and “and Other Stories” were common in book titles, and H. G. Wells had published The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents in 1895, there is apparently no precise precedent for “and Other Observations”. In a footnote of F. H. Bradley’s in Appearance and Reality ch. XIX, TSE underlined “In this connection I may remark that to observe a feeling is, to some extent, always to alter it”, commenting “Cf. Neo-Realism on introspection”. To Marianne Moore, 20 June 1934, on the contents of her planned Selected Poems and referring to her volume of 1924: “I take it that the order which you give them, which is the same as in Observations (a title, by the way, to which you have better claim than I) is the order of composition.”
In 1917, Prufrock and Other Observations bore the dedication “TO | JEAN VERDENAL | 1889–1915”. Verdenal, to whom the March Hare Notebook was also dedicated, was born on 11 May 1890, some twenty months after TSE. The dedication made him a still closer contemporary by giving his year of birth as 1889. Although his true date of birth was established by Watson in 1976 and confirmed by Valerie Eliot, Letters (1988) 20, it has not been corrected in editions of the poems. Verdenal had befriended TSE in Paris in 1910–11, and his surviving letters to TSE appear in Letters 1. To his mother, 22 Jan 1921: “If I had not met such a number of new people there Paris would be desolate for me with prewar memories of Jean Verdenal and the others.”
[Poems I 3–28 · Textual History II 309–36]
Watson translates Verdenal’s service record: “‘Killed by the enemy on the 2nd May 1915 in the Dardanelles,’ and then follows, in another hand, a citation dated 30 April 1915: ‘Scarcely recovered from pleurisy, he did not hesitate to spend much of the night in the water up to his waist helping to evacuate the wounded by sea, thus giving a notable example of self-sacrifice.’” TSE: “I am willing to admit that my own retrospect is touched by a sentimental sunset, the memory of a friend coming across the Luxembourg Gardens in the late afternoon, waving a branch of lilac, a friend who was later (so far as I could find out) to be mixed with the mud of Gallipoli”, A Commentary in Criterion Apr 1934. That memory can perhaps be dated to May 1911, when TSE mentioned a visit to the Musée du Luxembourg in a letter to Edward Forbes. The volume epigraph from Dante (see below) was reprinted in AraVP without Verdenal’s name, and when Valerie Eliot bought a copy for TSE late in his life he wrote in it: “This quotation is pointless without Verdenal’s name. This was the dedication to Jean Verdenal, a medical student from Pau who lodged in the same boarding house as I in Paris in 1910–11, with whom I became very friendly and who, as I learned much later, was killed in the trenches at the beginning of the 1914 war. It was an American woman, a Miss Crotty, who had been another lodger at the Casaubon’s at 151 bis Rue St. Jaques, who told me some years later. Two other friends killed in action: Carl [Karl] Culpin, Alain Fournier” (Valerie Eliot collection; copy previously owned by A. C. Benson, then Stephen Gaselee). The addition to the dedication “mort aux Dardanelles” (on the section title page for Prufrock and Other Observations within 1925+) resembles the wording “Died before the Dardanelles, April, 1915”, which had been printed immediately below the title of Arthur Davison Ficke’s To Rupert Brooke when it appeared in the same issue of Poetry as The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
The dedication in The Sacred Wood was “FOR | H.W.E. | ‘TACUIT ET FECIT’”. Since this is not the imperative form of the family motto Tace et fac, but the past tense, it refers not to TSE’s brother, as stated in Letters 1, but to their father, who had died in 1919. (For “the silent motto”, see note to East Coker I 13.) In 1925, the preposition in the Verdenal dedication on the Prufrock section title page was changed from “TO” to “For”, because the book as a whole was dedicated “TO HENRY WARE ELIOT | 1843–1919”. When every other element of 1925 was taken up into the extended Collected Poems 1909–1935 (1936), this dedication to TSE’s father was not preserv
ed.
TSE dropped other dedications when individual publications were superseded. Selected Essays, for instance, did not preserve the dedication “To George Saintsbury” from Homage to John Dryden or that “For Charles Maurras” from Dante (1929). In both the limited first edition and the trade edition of Ash-Wednesday (1930), when the poem constituted a whole book, a dedication leaf opposite the printer’s imprint read “TO | MY WIFE”, and this was retained in the only other separate edition, the second of 1933 (after TSE’s separation from Vivien); but it was not retained when the poem was reprinted as part of 1936+. Similarly, the acknowledgement at the foot of the contents page of Four Quartets to TSE’s friends, “and particularly to John Hayward”, was not retained when Four Quartets first appeared within a larger collection of TSE’s poems, US 1952, or on their appearance as part of 1963 (see Textual History headnote to Four Quartets).
[Poems I 3–28 · Textual History II 309–36]
Some of TSE’s childhood writings are dedicated “to My Wife” (see headnote to Fireside). TSE deprecated the dedication “For J. F. Hendry” in the typescript of Henry Treece’s Towards a Personal Armageddon (1942): “better omit · · · poems shd. be written for their own sake not for particular people” (Texas). Declining to be dedicatee of Herbert Read’s Collected Poems 1913–1925 (1926), TSE wrote to him, 11 Dec 1925: “About the dedication: for myself, modesty is not proof against such a compliment, and I am candidly immensely flattered and pleased. I know no greater compliment. Dedications are too often used for paying off worldly debts; as there is no debt at all in this case, I am all the more honoured. There is only one point that occurs to me as an objection, which I will put to you: namely: whether the statement of a certain community of interest and point of view implied by such a dedication is, from the point of view of efficacy, good or injurious? For the purpose of implanting the right ideas in the public mind, is an obvious intimacy a good thing or does it raise the spectre of a Gunpowder Plot? I have doubts. As you say, my knowledge of your wish is the main thing: and I hope you will base your decision on your judgment of what is most to the public interest! After all, no harm is done by your not dedicating the book!” The published book was dedicated to Read’s friend William Prior Read. (For a similar warning to Pound against the appearance of cliquery, see note to The Waste Land [V] 430.) To George Barker, 19 Mar 1935, however: “I have received your poem · · · I should, of course, feel honoured by the dedication.” The poem was probably Calamiterror (1937), although as published this was dedicated to Albert Gordon Barker. To Henry Treece, 29 Jan 1948: “I can’t see any reason for my preventing you from dedicating your book of Swinburne to me, if you think that a dedication is suitable on what is a selection from somebody else’s poems. But you will never be able to dedicate to me any book that Faber & Faber publish because I should certainly not allow that.” TSE continued to dedicate books of his own prose, including On Poetry and Poets, which is dedicated “To Valerie”. In 1959 The Elder Statesman had on a prefatory leaf the poem To My Wife, subsequently A Dedication to My Wife, the dedicatory verse printed at the close of 1963.
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 31